RE: [amsat-bb] eagle costs

["Assi Friedman" <4x1kx@xxxxxxxx>]

I do not have access to AMSAT's books but based on cost analysis for other
missions that I did and can make the following comments:
1. Hardware costs would always be rather low as compared to total project
cost especially if non high-rel or rad hard components are not used.
2. Most of the cost of the project goes into:
	a. Labor (not significantly relevant to AMSAT)
	b. Facilities 
 	c. Consumables (that includes solder and coffee amongst other things
:-) )
	c. Licenses for development tools - and yes it costs lots of money!
(RTOS license, compliers, FPGA design tools, mechanical and electrical CAD,
analysis packs and so on.)
	d. Shipping (Some may think that $13 for FedEx isn't much, but all
these costs add up!)
	e. Travel 
	f. Phone calls (I don't budget this for professional projects, but I
have a feeling this may add up to several thousand for AMSAT.) 
BTW, I have no knowledge what Echo or Eagle cost breakdown is and free AMSAT
labor is highly valuable, but we must not neglect that labor isn't
everything. BTW, it is my humble opinion that $110k for Echo is dirt cheap
granted it included everything!
Assi 4x1kx/kk7kx


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-AMSAT-BB@AMSAT.Org [mailto:owner-AMSAT-BB@AMSAT.Org] On Behalf
Of Chris N1ZPP
Sent: Friday, September 03, 2004 3:49 PM
To: amsat-bb@AMSAT.Org
Subject: Re: [amsat-bb] eagle costs

This is an interesting subject and something I've thought a lot about
for a while now.

For those of us that don't understand the all the details involved, why
exactly does a "cheap" satellite cost $110k?  Unless I'm missing
something, I'd think one could pull together the right parts for under
$5k.

So, where's the cost?  Do those guys in dust suits cost a lot of money? 
Do the vibration tests cost a lot of money?  Does the launch cost a lot
of money?  If an amateur satellite could fly on a commercial load as
balast, why does it cost much of anything?

How about this for cost... What about flying a small sat into orbit atop
an amateur rocket?  I bet there's an amateur rocket group somewhere out
there chomping at the idea of being the first amateur group to put a
satellite in orbit.  So why not team up?  Lets see if an amateur
satellite could be built for under $10k and launched on an amateur
rocket for very little cost.  $25k for the whole project, or am I being
naive?

--N1ZPP
//Chris
----
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